Tag: speaking

This morning before leaving to lead worship at a church in Chambersburg I help out once a month, I was listening to Joel Osteen’s broadcast. He was telling a story that really made an impression on me. Joel tells the story of a man who was a chronic worrier, always thinking about the worst that could happen to him. One day at his job he got locked in one of the refrigerated box cars without his radio or cell phone and no one was around. When he realized he was locked in, he panicked and started yelling and pounding on the door, doing this for hours until his hands were bleeding and he lost his voice. He knew he was in a refrigerated boxcar where the temperature was usually below freezing. He began to fear the worse, that he would not make it out and would freeze to death. He must have thought that he would not get out that night alive. The more he thought about it, the more cold he became until he was shaking from the cold. He found a cardboard box and wrote on it “So cold, body getting numb, these might be my last words”. The next morning when workers came and opened that steel doors to the boxcar they found him curled up in the corner, dead. The autopsy report revealed that he had indeed frozen to death. The amazing thing about this story is that the refrigeration unit in that car was never even on, the temperature was at 61 degrees. The man died because the thing he feared came upon him even though it was not the truth of what was actually happening. Continue reading “Are you thinking yourself to death or to life?”→